When writing SONG OF THE NILE, I spent some time wondering just what that song might sound like. Today we take it for granted that our favorite song can be recorded. We don’t have to hire the band to come to our house; we can just play it on our mp3 players. But while ancient poetry and sculptures have survived the ages, the music of antiquity is lost to us.
Allegedly, a form of musical notation did exist for the Greeks and Romans but generally went unused, because the art and mystery of music was supposed to be passed down from master to pupil. Even so, we know that music was an important part of ancient life because we see musicians depicted in frescoes and other art work that has survived. We even know the kinds of instruments they played.
Among the string instruments were the lyre and the cithara, the former being a smaller instrument for personal use, and the latter being an instrument for the stage. I wanted my heroine, Cleopatra Selene, to use music to charm the emperor, as if to soothe the savage beast. Consequently, I chose the cithara for her because it was closely associated with Apollo, the emperor’s patron deity.
Like a cross between a guitar and a harp, the cithara was played by singers or used in conjunction with a choir. A very close modern day relative of the instrument is the Ethiopian krar. (Here is a video of a woman playing the krar.) Just like modern harpists and guitar players can use a pick to strum on their instruments, so too did the ancients.
As for wind instruments, there were pipes aplenty in antiquity. Flutes, trumpets and horns figure prominently in ancient literature and artwork. Then, as now, they were useful not only for music but as a signal for battle or a warning of some imminent event. The one wind instrument I suspect Cleopatra Selene wanted nothing to do with was the flute. This is because her grandfather, Ptolemy XII, was mocked by the Romans as being a flouncing music-loving king. They called him Auletes, the Flute Player, a taunt that stuck with him throughout his reign.
The most important percussion instrument in the life of Cleopatra Selene would have been the sistrum, which was sacred to her goddess, Isis. Though technically a rattle, it sounds like many cymbals clanking together, somehow mysterious and otherworldly. (At the end of this video around 1:17, you can hear the shake of a sistrum and you’ll hear why it was used often by the priests and priestesses of Isis in their temples.)
How all these instruments came together in song, however, is a mystery. Because we have no recorded music, and only rudimentary notations, reproducing ancient music is an exercise in forensic archaeology. Nonetheless, there are several enterprising musicians who have tried, including Synaulia, whose music has been used on scores for movies like Gladiator.
I often listen to this music when I’m writing, to help me imagine the sounds that Selene would have heard during her lifetime. But the Song of the Nile? That is a call of her homeland, deep inside.